Why there is much more support for closed xls format in rails (and ruby) than to an open ods format?Corporations, enterprises and committees are not individuals, nor do they act or think as individuals. There is a well-known herd-mentality in groups, that as someone who's been in IT for years, I can attest to. They make stupid, cattle-like decisions, preferring safety of well-known (highly advertised) solutions over packages that fit their environment better and that could save them millions of dollars. I have dealt with it time and again. The assumption people go to the best solution no matter the cost is silly.

Why there is much more support for closed xls format in rails (and ruby) than to an open ods format?Interesting? Ha. It's enough to make us scream. Evidence? Not recent evidence in my case, but I've had requests in the past from management for very similar things. Some office drone abuses XLS, using it for everything they can think of, locking the data into a spreadsheet they can't live without, though it should never have been put there in the first place. We get called in WAY after the fact, and asked to pry it loose when someone leaves/gets invited to leave by management. There is no choice of using ODS or OS, it's a "do it now" task.

Do you own your tools?Or, if the fancy hammer doesn't exist, as programmers we can try to find other programmers, band together, and develop a new and improved hammer to replace them all. We should call it a... "Screwdriver!" :-)

Feb1

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Why do we have postfix increment?"it must have mattered a lot on those 0.001GHz machines". Um, I hate to say it because it dates me, but I had Motorola and Intel manuals for my CPUs to look up the size of the instructions and how many cycles they took. Finding the smallest codes added up to being able to add one more feature to a print spooler and saving a couple cycles meant a serial port could keep up with some protocol like that newly invented MIDI. C relieved some of the nit-picking, especially as the compilers improved, but still it was important knowing what was the most efficient way to write code.

Feb1

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Why do we have postfix increment?+1 "some people find while (*dst++ = *src++); to simply be a more beautiful solution". Definitely. People who don't understand assembly language don't really understand how elegant C can be, but that particular code statement is a shining star.